Box Office: 'Warcraft' Bombs In America, Is Huge In China

Warcraft is something of a rarity. It is unquestionably a domestic disaster, opening with $24.3 million on its debut weekend with a $160m budget, poor reviews, and little hope of anything resembling legs over the next few weeks. That's a mediocre 2.27x weekend multiplier. It will likely end up with $55-$65m in North America. There is basically nothing good to say about its domestic numbers. But, as you probably know, it's something of a monster over in China.

The film opened Wednesday and earned $46 million on its first and second days, with $91m heading into the traditional weekend. It slowed down a bit after those first two days, earning $32m on Friday, $21m on Saturday, and $11m on Sunday. So, with $24m in North America, $105m overseas outside of China (it's been slowly expanding outside of America over the last couple weeks), and the aforementioned $156m China
box office bounty, the film's worldwide total is now $286.1m worldwide.

To sum it up so far, the film is a John Carter/Jack the Giant Slayer-style bomb in the U.S., but it is already one of the bigger grossers ever in China. It has already outgrossed the likes of Star Wars: The Force Awakens and Iron Man 3, while becoming the 25th film in history to earn over $150 million in China. It will earn at least $320m worldwide, thus doubling its production budget in theatrical alone, and a $400m total (2.6x) is well within reach. It will earn at least $336m worldwide, thus displacing Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time as the biggest video game movie ever worldwide. And it almost certainly will become one of biggest Hollywood releases ever in China.

But beyond that the picture is fuzzy. The film will be thrilled to hit $65 million in North America, so that's pretty much a done deal. While it's not done overseas yet (there are around 14 territories where it hasn't opened), it took three weeks to hit $100m overseas, so it's not like there are hundreds-upon-hundreds of millions of foreign dollars yet to be plundered. And as for China, the film ended up being massively frontloaded, and not just because Sunday was a workday. A 3.4x five-day weekend multiplier is not super promising and five day openings tend to be very front-loaded theatrical runs.

While fans of the game here and abroad are seemingly enjoying the final product (and that darn well matters), it's not exactly converting newbies. At this juncture, we're probably looking at a $275 million total in China with a shot at $300m by the end. That's huge and may be enough to justify a (cheaper) sequel. So the big question is how much gas it has left in the rest of the world.

If it gets to $175 million overseas, $55m in North America and $250m in China, it gets to $455m worldwide. But if we play best case scenario and it earns $250m overseas, $300m in China, and $65m in America for a $615m worldwide total, which would be a little amazing. Or you can split the difference and say $150m overseas, $275m in China, and $60m in the U.S. which gets you $485m. You can do the math moving bits and pieces around for probable outcomes.

But no, this probably isn't a $800 million+ worldwide smash that changes the face of Hollywood forever, although there is at least one good lesson here (adapt stuff people actually want to see get adapted). In a summer of sequels and reboots, it's a little refreshing to see a "new to movies" property adaptation doing somewhat well somewhere in the world. Either way, it's probably going to have one of the lowest domestic percentages of the total gross for any major Hollywood release ever, if not THE lowest.

And since Blizzard, Legendary (now owned by China's Dalian Wanda), Atlas, and Universal all shouldered the risk, no one is going to lose too big no matter how this sorts itself out (Legendary distributed the film in China). There will be much to discuss on this one as the word of mouth and buzz in China do their thing (for better or worse), and we get a better idea of how it's going to do in the rest of the world. But yeah, for at least five days, Warcraft was one of the most exciting box office stories of the year. Now let's hope Duncan Jones gets a well-deserved vacation and then goes off to make Mute.

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I've studied the film industry, both academically and informally, and with an emphasis in box office analysis, for 28 years. I have extensively written about all of said subjects for the last ten years. My outlets for film criticism, box office commentary, and film-skewing ...